From the cable office in Panama City, Anton sent an article to the magazine at home. It was the simple update – news of what had been going on – that the editor had requested. To make it worth the expense of having sent him there, he added descriptions of the terrain and opinions taken from interviews he’d done. His main work, it was agreed, would be undertaken on his return; this would include a new perspective on the French failures.

The seas at either end had meanwhile been allowed to press against the lock gates. In October it was decided to flood the Cut; the rest of the clearance could be done by dredges underwater. So the steam shovels and the rail tracks were lifted out of Hell’s Gorge for the last time; thousands gathered to watch a triumphant explosion, to be triggered by President Roosevelt down a telegraph wire from Washington. It was intended to be the moment at which the great oceans met, but a mudslide in the Cut had the last word, its debris obstructing the connection. No amount of explosive could shift the mess, and the tourists went home.

A short time afterwards, the river Chagres flooded. Anton was on his way back to Colón when he noticed gangs of men working to divert the flow. The driver stopped the train and they watched from above as the stream became a torrent and began to sweep the stubborn mud and rocks from its path. In the end, it was not the touch of the president’s finger that joined the Atlantic to the Pacific, but the invincible local river, channelled at the last moment into a cut made, after all these years, by an old French dredge.

4

On his arrival back in Vienna, Anton noticed a change of atmosphere. For the first time he saw schoolgirls walking without governesses and young women without chaperones; there were also fewer line girls on the streets. The parks were fuller and the people, for some reason, looked as if they had become more healthy. Some were returning from the ski resorts, which explained their glowing skin; others seemed to have benefited from exercise regimes or an improvement to the posture. And in the newspapers he skimmed in order to catch up, there were reports from Paris, London and Berlin of new museums and theatres, broader boulevards and more luxurious shops; there were production figures that showed shipyards and steelworks at full stretch.

At the offices of the magazine, the editor was clear. ‘I want the readers to feel they’ve been at the bottom of this Cut,’ he said. ‘I want them to sweat with fear and tropical fever. Spare us nothing. I’m getting the pictures in tomorrow. We can sell a lot of copies on this.’

For the first time in his life, Anton had enough money. He decided to rent a small house in Baden, a spa town less than an hour by train from Vienna. It was not his dream dacha near Moscow nor the lodge in a Bavarian forest, but a small white house up a lane with a garden that gave on to the Kurpark, from which there was a trail into the Vienna Woods. It had a thatched roof and was two minutes’ walk from the next house; it would provide him with all the quiet he needed for his work while being near enough to the life of the town.